Black holes in General Relativity and beyond

Understand

The recent detections of gravitational waves from binary systems of black holes are in remarkable agreement with the predictions of General Relativity.

• In this pedagogical mini-review, I will go through the physics of the different phases of the evolution of black hole binary systems, providing a qualitative physical interpretation of each one of them.
• I will also briefly describe how these phases would be modified if gravitation were described by a theory extending or deforming General Relativity, or if the binary components turned out to be more exotic compact objects than black holes.